Robbie Collin revels in a tremendous performance from Best Actor
Timothy Spall, who stars as JMW Turner in Mike Leigh's biopic Mr Turner

Eighteen years after he co-starred in a film that won the Palme d’Or, on Saturday night Timothy Spall had his solo moment in the Cannes Film Festival spotlight. At the festival’s closing ceremony, Spall was named best actor for his portrayal of the Joseph Mallord William Turner in Mr Turner, Mike Leigh’s critically adored biopic of the artist.

That Palme-winning film was Secrets & Lies, an earlier collaboration with Leigh that stole the show on the Croisette in 1996. But in 2014, Spall has been singled out, and rightly so: JMW Turner is the role of his career.

He makes the artist as puffily eccentric as a top-tier Dickens creation – “a moulting, phlegmy Gruffalo” was how I described him in the middle of the festival frenzy, when critics sometimes write strange things – although Spall ensures you can always feel a real humanity, and Turner’s seemingly God-given genius for art, burning away beneath the comic tics.

He also has some joyously quotable dialogue, delivered with a hundred different types of harrumph on the side. “Brook your ire, sir!” – which is bellowed at a fellow Royal Academician who dares complain that his painting has been hung in a side-chamber – might even become a catchphrase.

Now, of course, the speculation will begin over Spall’s chance of duplicating the honour at next year’s Baftas, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves: this is a tremendous honour for a tremendous performance in a triply tremendous film.